Wednesday, March 24, 2010

More on ‘Social Justice’

Private charity, which Beck and I are both for, wasn't enough to end the slave trade in Great Britain, end legal racial segregation in America, or end apartheid in South Africa. That took vital movements of faith which understood the connection between personal compassion and social justice. Those are the movements that have inspired me and shaped my life -- not BIG GOVERNMENT. And my allies in faith-based social justice movements have wonderfully different views on the role of government -- some bigger than mine and some smaller than mine -- but we all believe social justice requires changing both personal choices and unjust structures. Apparently Beck thinks social justice ends with private charity, but very few churches in the nation would agree with him.

Kent comments:

Jim Wallis – the socialist who thinks that is the central belief of the Christian faith – is still complaining that Glen Beck urged Christians to bail out of churches that preach ‘social justice.’ That should surprise no one. Without so-called churches that make ‘social justice’ (which is neither social nor just) a key teaching, Jim Wallis would be out of business. He could no longer jet around the world, in a life style that would be the envy of billions of people on earth, preaching that it is a sin for one human being to have more than another.

But that’s not the main point here.

It is nothing short of idiotic for Wallis to tell us that ‘private charity’ ‘wasn’t enough’ to do things like end the slave trade or racial segregation. Only the straw men of Wallis’ warped imagination ever thought ‘charity’ could end slavery.

Slavery was unjust because it used the force of the state to coerce people into giving their whole lives to their ‘owners.’ Ironically, the ‘social justice’ Wallis constantly whines for does exactly the same thing to a lesser degree. Instead of using the state to force someone to be the ‘property’ of someone else, Wallis wants the state to own only a part of you. That part is the part that is taxed and regulated away from you, which in recent years is about half of you. While that is not full slavery, it is a ‘partial slavery’ that has the added sinister feature of being disguised slavery.

But it is no more ‘just’ that was slavery. And it is anti-Christian, which is exactly why any group that advocates ‘social justice’ is not worthy of the name ‘church.’